TV & FILM

Diamonds (2009) takes the rich contents of Matthew’s book about one of the world’s most secretive industries and packs it into a fast-moving plot. A titanic and ruthless multinational, Africa’s murderous diamond wars, a United States senator and her diamond-prospecting daughter – all this gets stirred into what the New York Daily News called “a potboiler” that mixes “an urgent social message” with a story brimming with “good old-fashioned ruling-class manipulation and intrigue.”

Mission to Mir (1997) follows a team of American astronauts as they put themselves into the hands of Russian cosmonauts to train for a stay in the Mir (Russian word for “peace”) space station. Covers training at Star City near Moscow, the shoot from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and unbeatable footage from space. The Americans had intensive training in how to handle the massive IMAX cameras in the confines of the space station. “Of course in space it’s zero gravity,” said Astronaut Charlie Precourt, “but the camera has a lot of inertia. Once we got it moving it was a challenge to stop it.”

Into the Deep (1994) opens with a helicopter tracking-shot along the California coast, then plunges the viewer beneath the surface for an exploration of a hidden world – the kelp forest. These giant sea-plants may grow from a depth of 600 feet, and can grow towards the surface by as much as two feet in a single day. The heavy stems are held upright by masses of gas-filled bladders called pneumatocysts, and among the undulating fronds is one of the earth’s most dynamic ecosystems.